Bird Releases Contemplative Soundscapes

“If I were the night sky / Here’s my lullaby,” sings Andrew Bird in deep, drawn-out vocals on his latest CD, “Break It Yourself,” a stunning and mature album that provokes more contemplation than his lighthearted previous releases. What the album sometimes lacks in accessible hooks and Bird’s signature syllabic experimentation it makes up for with a streamlined musical focus on harmony and a lyrical focus on mortality and love. The album is a nature-inspired lullaby whose reflective material gently lulls the reader into the morbid and beautiful mind of Andrew Bird himself.

While many of Bird’s older albums were dominated by songs with stunning and dense internal rhyme schemes like “Fake Palindromes,” “Break It Yourself” forgoes intricate phonetic craft in favor of vivid imagery and instrumental intricacies. “I didn’t know that your love was a commodity,” he sings to a former lover. “What about appreciation? That depends on your depth and density / What about inflation? Charts and graphs don’t mean nothing to me / In your nation with its worthless currency.” There are few other songwriters who could so creatively string together a girlfriend-as-an-industrialized-country metaphor.

In the second half of the album, Bird shifts his focus to a careful construction of musical soundscapes. His extensive musical environments consisting of little more than a violin are particularly compelling; in musical interludes like that in “Things Behind the Barn,” for example, high-pitched and looping strings encapsulate the eerie abandonment of a rural farm at dusk. And the final track of the album, “Belles,” is a wordless song of ringing wind chimes and crickets.

The undeniable tour-de-force of the album is “Orpheo Looks Back,” the only track that approaches, on its own, the iconic brilliance of nostalgic, lovelorn older songs like “The Trees Were Mistaken.” Bird builds this recursive, violin-based track on the Greek myth of Orpheus, who tried to rescue his wife Eurydice from the underworld. Her return, however, was based on his agreement to never turn around during their journey; when Orpheus became nervous and turned to look at her, he lost her forever. “When Orpheo keeps on straining,” Bird wonders, “Is it to see what lies behind her / Through the shells of empty buildings and great columns of glass? / Say you don’t look, say you don’t look / ’Cause it’ll drive you mad.” The looping layers of violin slowly morph into dizzying rounds of repeated and layered lyrics, an innovative and gripping shift. Bird’s singing, whistling, and fiddling come together to enthusiastic effect.

The most unexpected aspect of the album, however, is Bird’s balancing act as he explores the thin line between life and death. “Near Death Experience Experience” finds him tempting fate: “So you dare the plane to crash / Redeem the miles for cash / When it starts to dive,” he sings against an upbeat percussive background. “And we’ll dance like cancer survivors, like we’re grateful simply to be alive.” Yet not all is immortal hubris: in the slower, hypnotic “Fatal Shore,” Bird contemplates the afterlife with oceanic imagery: “When are you coming to shore, coming to shore? To never fear any more, fear any more?” He loops and repeats the lyrics with fading whistles and pulsing drumbeats to create a mesmerizing virtual hypnosis.

The main flaw in “Break It Yourself” is the relative weakness of the album’s second half; for an artist who clearly puts so much thought into arrangement and lyricism, the album takes a long time to settle into its thematic concepts. Yet the folksy fiddler has never engineered albums for easy listening—and who can deny the observational genius of a man who contemplates how “the moon plays the ocean like a violin?” Like the pervasive imagery of nature throughout the album, “Break It Yourself” is haphazardly organized yet beautiful in effect.

–Staff writer Leanna B. Ehrlich can be reached at lehrlich@college.harvard.edu.